13. I hate you
I HATE YOU
KITTY
I stare at the goldfish doing laps around the mixing bowl I stole to put him in yesterday, my brain refusing to turn off.
Cutter disappeared and never came back to the party.
That isn’t like him. Then again, showing up at my door with a damn goldfish isn’t like him either.
How long can goldfish live without food?
Sighing, I throw myself back on the bed.
I waited all night for the knock to come, but it never did.
Not that I would’ve let him in. And I refused to go to him.
Alcohol is supposed to numb the pain of heartbreak, but all it did was amplify it.
I became lost in my own turbulent thoughts and still can’t escape them now, long after the sun has come up.
I sit up and grab the bowl, sending water splashing over my hands and leave my room, wandering the clubhouse halls. Most of the visitors have left and the prospects cleaned the mess, leaving the smell of disinfectant in the air.
“What are you doing?” I ask when I stumble upon Grease up a ladder.
“Pres wants cameras fitting in the passageways.” He says, tightening a screw and positioning the lens. The ladder looks ready to buckle under his hulky frame, so I take a step back.
“Aren’t the cameras in all the common rooms enough?”
“I don’t ask questions sweetheart, I just do the work.”
“It’s ridiculous, next he will want them in our bedrooms. This place is starting to resemble a prison.”
Snorting, he sticks me with a pointed stare, “Trust me, I’ve served time, it isn’t.” If they put a camera near my bedroom, I’m hanging my bra over it. “Are you carrying a goldfish around?”
Looking to the bowl, I shrug. “Yeah.”
Inhaling a gust of air he chuckles, “Okay, that’s totally normal.”
“Normal is boring.” I huff, leaving him to his job.
“Kitty,” Maggie calls out as I pass the kitchen, making me backtrack.
Furrowing my brow, I take in the three women, all replicas, huddling around Diamond on a laptop. “What’s going on?”
Diamond waves me over, and curiosity gets the better of me.
Placing the bowl on the counter, I lean over Maggie’s shoulder to get a glimpse of the screen.
It’s a news article about a murder with an image I recognize. “Is that Tim?” I gasp.
“His real name is Harvey,” Diamond announces, tapping her long painted nail on the screen. Harvey Wickworth.
“Harvey doesn’t suit him,” one of the blondes says.
“Doesn’t matter now, he’s dead,” I point out. “What does it say happened?”
“Stabbed.” Maggie makes the motion for effect, and one of the other women giggles. Morbid.
“They have his girlfriend in custody,” Diamond tuts. “Or who they think is. Found her at a gas station covered in his blood.”
It’s a shame. I liked him. But what had he done to drive her to such extremes? He was no doubt playing mind games with her and eventually she snapped. Maybe that will happen to me too.
“Is that a goldfish?” Maggie’s voice pierces my thoughts. She dips her finger in the bowl, and I smack her hand away. Who does that?
“Yes.”
“Why do you have a goldfish?” Diamond frowns.
“I honestly don’t know.” A laugh rumbles from my chest. Scooping the bowl back into my arms, I leave them to discuss the name that does suit the dead Tim and head to Cutter’s room.
I’ll leave the damn fish there. He can worry about feeding it.
I try the handle without knocking. It gives under my hand, and I push inside.
His scent envelopes me in an embrace he can’t deny me.
Then the world stills.
All the air flees my lungs.
“Cutter?” the female voice groans from beneath the comforter on his bed.
My fingers clutch the bowl so my shaking arms don’t drop it. Sickness swills my empty stomach, and tears burn my eyes without permission.
“Cutter?”
No. No. No. No. No. No.
Claire’s blonde hair peeks from beneath the gray comforter, followed by her blue eyes, elegant features bare of makeup, and slim, naked shoulders.
“Kitty?” Her voice shakes, eyes widening.
“What are you doing in here?” My words lash out like a whip. This isn’t real. I’m asleep in my bed. I didn’t leave my room. Pinch me, pinch me, please, someone, pinch me.
Startled eyes focus on the presence over my shoulder, the heavy booted footfalls joining my hellscape. I can’t take my eyes from the whore in his bed. The bed I crept into every night for months.
“Kit.” The cautious, almost soft way he says my name fills my bones with lead. Guilt. That’s fucking guilt in his tone.
“What did you do?” This was always going to happen. But so soon? And with her—HER!
“We need to talk,” he says, but I’m not sure which of us he means. “Claire, go get some food or something, yeah?”
“Okay,” she murmurs, pushing the covers from her body. Her fingers cling to a towel that gapes, showing too much skin.
Snatching a t-shirt from the dresser on her way past me, I have to fight every instinct screaming to tear her hair out. She drops the towel without shame and drags the fabric over her body before scooting out the door.
Silence weights down the room, making my limbs feel too heavy for my frame. “Did you seriously fuck her ?” Anger, disgust, and raw heartbreak spew into every word I speak.
This is the end.
“It’s complicated, Kit,” he says to my back.
Whipping around to face him, the bowl in my hands flies across the room before I even register throwing it at him. Clear shards shatter on impact, water raining down the wall beside his head. Our poor goldfish flops at his feet, just like my withered dying heart.
He broke me.
He finally did it.
“Christ, Kit.” He scoops the thing up and searches the room, his eyes landing on a glass of water beside the bed.
Is that the water Claire needed after he fucked her into exhaustion like he did me two nights ago?
He dumps the little guy into the glass, and it bobs around in the small confines, trapped, butting against the same resistance over and over. A perfect metaphor. It’s almost comical.
Don’t let this be real.
“All I wanted was you,” I say, defeated, my chest deflating. “I gave you all of me, and you chewed me up and spit me out like gum that lost its taste.”
“It’s complicated, Kit. A lot of moving parts.” My heart can’t take it. I’m dying. He won’t look at me, his hands shoved into his pockets, head bowed.
Spineless bastard.
“No,” I scoff. “Just your parts moving inside her.” A wave washes over me, dark and endless. Everything I’ve ever wanted is slipping through my hands like sand.
He’s right.
I do deserve better.
“She’s pregnant.”
My knees almost buckle, his words wrapping around my throat, choking the life from me. No. He’s wrong. Joking. This is not fucking real.
“I didn’t fuck her last night. It was weeks ago. I was drunk.”
“Shut up,” I stammer, clenching a hand to my chest.
Stop speaking.
“Kit…”
“Stop.” Killing me with a knife . How Harvey’s girlfriend chose to end him was less brutal than this.
Pain compresses my chest. There’s no air.
I’m dying.
“I’m sorry…” he says, but it’s not enough.
It’s. Not. Enough.
Say something else.
Make this better .
Take it back.
“I’m really sorry, Kit…”
IT’S NOT ENOUGH!
My breathing is labored. I’m drowning, breaking into pieces in front of him, giving him my final breaths.
No .
Gathering the last scraps of my dignity, I still myself and spit out, “Your sorry means nothing. You. Mean. Nothing.” Marching to the bedside table, I take the glass and hold it up as I pass him, grabbing the door handle. “You don’t deserve the fish. And you sure as fuck never deserved me.”
He grabs my wrist to halt my departure, his blue eyes doused in electric fire. “Tell me you hate me, Kit.”
Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I summon a calm I don’t feel and jerk my arm free. “I don’t hate you anymore, Cutter. I pity you.”
Now, it’s over.
As I stand at the threshold of the club bar the perpetual dull ache in my stomach, like knowing something bad is about to happen, expands to my chest, a weight of dread crushing down on me.
Despair and grief seep into my bones at seeing Cutter standing there with his hand clasped in hers.
My stomach growls, but I’m not hungry. Food fuels the living. I’m barely surviving.
“Cutter has an announcement!” Dad informs the room, nodding in their direction.
I hold my breath, gripping the doorframe so tightly, my nails splinter under the pressure.
I’d managed to pick myself up from the bedroom floor, my eyes swollen and red with the ocean of tears I shed since learning about Claire.
Now, all I want is to be back in my room, hiding, dying alone.
But the fish needs food. I’ll let myself starve, but not him. I need him.
The phantom wound in my chest pulses. Stab—stab—stab. Everyone is focused on Cutter, all laughter and smiles. Do they not see me over here, a shadow of who I once was?
Heartbreak is loneliness wrapping its hands around your throat until every inhale feels like swallowing glass. I’m invisible and everyone I care about is blind to my torment.
Cutter’s brow crashes as he finds my gaze across the room. Tears burn the corners of my eyes, but I refuse to cry.
Not in front of him.
Never in front of her.
I track the gulp bobbing in his throat then fixate on his lips as he says, “We’re getting married.”
The world stops spinning. My legs threaten to buckle beneath me.
The little speck of hope still alive inside me drains away like the tide receding.
In an instant, all our memories flood my mind, all the laughter, intimacy—it’s too much for one heart to bear, and mine bursts like a balloon.
I’m sure the rupture can be heard throughout the room, yet no one says a thing.
My body folds over on itself without warning, the air fleeing my lungs.
Forcing myself to turn away, I propel forward, leaning on the wall for support as I make my way back down the hall. Confusion, anger, and sorrow battle for dominance in my mind until I focus on the one thing I need: acceptance.
He’s marrying her.
He thinks the grass will be greener with a club slut than with me. Maybe the grass will be greener when it’s my sorrow watering it.